


start with the edges

by ghost_teeth



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Connor is a magpie, Friends to Lovers, Hank is emotionally constipated, M/M, Pining, Post-Pacifist Best Ending (Detroit: Become Human), Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-06-26 16:55:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15667368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/pseuds/ghost_teeth
Summary: How does one begin to build a self? A life?In the aftermath of the revolution, each fumbles toward some kind of normal in his own way. Hank clings to what is comfortable. Connor seems more inclined to help himself to anything that isn't nailed down.





	1. sort by color and shape

**March 9, 2039**

 

Time passes—slow and excruciating, like some kind of monstrous kidney stone. But it does pass.

Things change, or they don’t. People change, or they don’t. Everything is raw and ugly and thrilling and new and deeply, deeply weird.

Still, there are some pockets of normal. There’s work. There’s a paycheck waiting at the end of every other week. There’s a desk with two spots worn shiny where Hank’s elbows have rested for years. There’s an elderly swiveling chair battered into the exact shape of Hank’s ass. There are fossilized French fries rattling in all the desk drawers. There’s coffee and it’s comfortably awful.

And, after a few months’ administrative hemming and hawing, there’s a new-ish face at the adjacent desk, but even that, in its way, is… familiar. Easy. 

“Be a dear and get me a coffee,” Hank groans as he sinks into his terrible chair, the same way he does almost every morning.

“Get it yourself,” says Connor serenely, the same way he does almost every morning. “You could use the exercise.” He looks up from his paperwork for only an instant to flash Hank his most obnoxious grin, the loony, toothy one that makes him look like he ought to host a children’s TV show.

Hank politely advises Connor to sit on it and spin before slouching off to the break room for coffee, feeling distantly satisfied with the completion of his morning routine.

Although he’s never in the office early enough to prove it, Hank has a suspicion that Connor is the first one in the bullpen every morning. Would probably be the last one there every night, too, if Hank didn’t rib him about it.

Connor has been renting a place within walking distance of the station, one of those dinky hastily converted half-studios marketed to renters who maybe don’t need a bathroom or a kitchen. Hank has the address, though he’s never seen the inside of it (it’s not like Connor’s ever invited him up, and anyway, why would he even _want_ to hang out in Connor’s sad little robo-closet?). He has a vague mental image of Connor just standing rigid in the middle of an empty room all night until it’s time to leave for work again in the morning.

Hank tries not to dwell on this often. The thought gives him indigestion.

When he brings his cup of rank, burnt coffee back to his desk, Connor is engaged in separating large stacks of paperwork into mysterious constellations of smaller stacks. A revolting atmosphere of smug self-satisfaction hangs over the proceedings and Hank has to tamp down sudden conflicting urges to either brush all of the papers onto the floor or give Connor a scratch behind the ears like he might Sumo.

Aside from the papers, Connor’s desk is bare and impersonal. The only indication that somebody sits there at all is the shiny new DET. CONNOR nameplate.

Hank has, over the months, made numerous attempts to sneak tacky decorations onto the desk without Connor noticing— _The Far Side_ calendars, little plastic wind-up animals from vending machines—but the items are always spirited off to lord-knows-where without comment as soon as they’re noticed. It’s almost a game.

(Hank doesn’t think Connor is throwing them away. He may have checked their shared trashcan a few times.

And maybe also the one in the break room.)

“Hank?” Connor looks up suddenly.

“Mm?”

“May I borrow some paperclips? I’m out.”

With a grunt, Hank passes over the ancient THIS IS PROBABLY WHISKEY mug he uses to hold loose change and thumbtacks and other odds and ends. He’s pretty sure there are some paperclips in there. Probably.

Connor frowns into the mug and picks out an ancient safety pin with exaggerated care. His capacity for hyperbole has evolved immensely over the past few months. “You know, I was just thinking to myself that I’d love to start my day off with tetanus.”

“You can’t get tetanus.”

“It’s a brave new world, Lieutenant. You have no idea what I’m capable of.”

“You don’t like it, you can take your capable ass to the supply closet and get some yourself.”

For the next few minutes, Hank gives himself eyestrain trying to watch from beneath the shade of his eyebrows as Connor rakes his fingers through the detritus of Hank’s professional life, delicately picking out the occasional bent paperclip and setting it aside. Connor has long, restless fingers. Always moving. Always touching or adjusting or fidgeting. Even before he deviated.

The hunt pauses as Connor plucks something out of the mug and lifts it to the light to examine it. “What’s this from?”

Hank makes a great show of tearing himself away from the tablet he hasn’t even turned on yet. “What?” he grouses.

Connor waggles the item at him, and it winks gold in the fluorescent lighting. A button, Hank realizes. Some cheap brass plated thing. He doesn’t remember it, but then, that mug has been on his desk for almost fifteen years.

“I have no idea. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been accumulating shit in there?” Hank squints at the button. “Jacket button, maybe? Hell if I know. Might not even be mine.”

Connor makes a thoughtful little humming noise, the LED in his temple ticking a lazy blue circle, then resumes his search for paperclips. Hank surreptitiously turns on his tablet, feeling oddly as though he has just surfaced for air.

Later that afternoon, when Connor has puttered away on some clerical errand, Hank finds himself pawing through the mug’s contents in search of the button. Just to see if it’s missing from something important, he tells himself.

There are more than a few buttons in the mug, but somehow, Hank can’t quite seem to find the one that Connor picked out.

 

* * *

**March 10, 2039**

 

A few nights a week, Connor accompanies Hank to the parking lot and climbs into the passenger’s seat of the car uninvited. Hank isn’t sure how it started. It’s never pre-planned, never discussed. He just sort of does and does not expect Connor to follow him home every night 

Hank doesn’t know what moods compel Connor to follow him home on some evenings and return to his own apartment on others. Hank doesn’t invite, doesn’t refuse. It’s quiet and easy and organic.

On what Hank has come to think of as Connor Nights, the two of them might sit on Hank’s tiny sofa late into the night, both of them pinned under Sumo’s great bulk, watching garbage TV and complaining about it. Or they might talk shop in the kitchen while Hank shovels week-old lo mien into his face and Connor gives the takeout containers the hairy eyeball. Sometimes they engage in entirely separate activities—Hank drunk and cussing a blue streak at a hockey game, Connor plowing through Hank’s substantial collection of vintage Ian Rankin paperbacks. 

When he’s visiting Hank, Connor is careful to shed whatever sleek colorless blazer he was wearing that day and drape it neatly over the back of a kitchen chair, roll up the sleeves of his crisp shirt, remove his shoes. It’s a fumbling performance of relaxation from someone who clearly doesn’t quite get the point, but Hank sort of appreciates the effort anyway. Even if the effect is sort of like a bank teller on a mid-week walk of shame.

The Wednesday after the button incident finds the two of them on the living room sofa—Hank soggy with cheap beer, Connor pretending not to be thoroughly invested in some super exploitative medical mystery show.

Hank is using a scrap of naan to sponge up the last of his mattar paneer when something draws his focus from the television. A sort of quiet crinkling noise. He slides a furtive glance to the other side of the sofa.

Connor, whose attention has until now been wholly devoted to the TV, is focused on something on the coffee table with the kind of terrifying concentration only an android can bring to bear. He’s bent over something, futzing with it—tinfoil, Hank realizes, from the naan. At some point, Connor must have swiped it and is now engaged in folding it into smaller and smaller squares. His hands move with preternatural precision, creating neat sharp folds with perfectly symmetrical sides.

Some inane comment about a metal man doing metal origami dies somewhere between Hank’s throat and his mouth as he watches. Connor isn’t just absently fidgeting with the tinfoil for something to do with his hands—there’s care in every movement, maybe something like _reverence._ The foil catches the glow off his LED, throwing soft blue sparks back onto his face. There’s something weirdly sacred about the entire activity, Hank thinks, but that might be the beers talking.

It takes a long moment of watching from the corner of his eye for Hank to realize what makes the scene so surreal.

The skin at the tips of Connor’s fingers has peeled away, revealing the cool inorganic white of him. There’s a glow to it, almost, remote and bluish, like something backlit from a great distance.

He’s seen Connor’s hands like this—many times, in fact, reaching out to interface with another android or to use an access pad. It’s never struck him like this before, though. Maybe because it’s always been in a professional setting, always for a reason. This is different. This is purposeless, personal. _Intimate._ Connor is feeling up a piece of naan foil with his creepy little robo-fingers for some goddamn reason and Hank feels horribly compelled to watch.

Finally, Connor seems to decide that he’s fondled the tinfoil into a small enough square. He holds it up to eye level for a second, as if to admire it, then delicately tucks it into the breast pocket of his button-down. And then, as if this was a totally normal thing he does all the time, he settles in and re-immerses himself in _My Unborn Twin Tried to Kill Me._

Although whatever strange spell had fallen over the living room seems to have broken, Hank finds the sofa feels lumpier than before, and his beer seems to have gone mysteriously flat and skunky.

And maybe Connor’s hands, folded neatly in his lap and fully people-skinned again, look somehow incomplete.

 

* * *

 

Hank starts to notice things, after that.

It’s usually small things, unwanted things—garbage, more often than not. He rarely catches Connor in the act, but over the course of a few days, he becomes acutely attuned to absence.

A ballpoint pen that’s been out of ink probably since the Bronze Age disappears from Hank’s pencil cup. The THIS IS PROBABLY WHISKEY mug gets lighter by the day as its population of grimy pennies and thumbtacks slowly decreases. And the disappearances aren’t exclusive to Hank’s desk. The coffee stirrers in the break room seem to be depleted a lot faster these days, and the half-melted blue ‘3’ candle that has lived among the Sweet n’ Low packets since somebody’s 30th birthday is noticeably absent.

He’s not totally sure what to do with these observations. He can’t even really prove it’s Connor helping himself to the office’s orphaned odds and ends—he just knows, somehow.

What could Connor even be doing with all the junk he’s accumulated? Maybe he’s just cleaning? Throwing it away later? Is he… keeping it? Hank tries to picture Connor in his tiny apartment, neck-deep in pilfered trash, but he just can’t reconcile the image with Connor’s modest but growing wardrobe of tailored blazers and his immaculate desk.

Is he supposed to bring it up in conversation? _Hey, so I’ve noticed you appear to be turning into a magpie. Want to talk about that? Also, please don’t ask why I’ve been noticing you so aggressively lately because honestly I don’t have the bandwidth to unpack that right now._

Maybe it’s none of his business. Connor’s a person now, after all, entitled to all of the little weirdnesses and tics and idiosyncrasies that come with that. If it’s not illegal or hurting anybody, there’s no reason for Hank to make it his business.

And if Hank occasionally deposits his spare change into the mug or leaves particularly eye-catching candy wrappers sitting out on his desk… well, he’s a notorious slob, so who’s to say it’s out of the ordinary.

 

* * *

**March 14, 2039**

 

“I hate this,” Connor says.

It’s one of those nasty mid-March mornings, still gray and moon-silent like winter, but warm enough that the streets and sidewalks are all ankle-deep slush. It’s the sort of weather that yanks at old aches and has Hank almost longing for a time when nobody would have batted an eye if he called in “sick” and shacked up with a bottle of Black Lamb.

And yet, here he is, coaxing his suffering car through the flooded streets at ass o’clock in the morning to follow up on a lead, and feeling something dangerously close to cheerful about it. Connor, on the other hand, has been uncharacteristically quiet up until this point. Usually during car rides, he’s all small talk about the radio and personal questions, but today he seems preoccupied.

“I hate this,” he says again, and it’s slow, almost like he’s tasting the words.

“What, the weather?” Hank glances over at the passenger’s side. Connor isn’t looking out the window, though. Instead, he appears to be literally navel-gazing, fingers drumming on his knee. Hank catches the reflection of his LED in the window—spasmodic flickers of blue-yellow-red-yellow-blue.

When Connor doesn’t respond, Hank turns his attention back to the road. The last thing he needs is to hydroplane into a lamppost because he was too busy trying to psychoanalyze his partner.

Then: “I hate this.” This time, it’s a cheerful declaration, and in his peripheral vision, Hank sees Connor’s hands go up to the knot of his tie.

“What the hell are you—” Before Hank can even finish his question, Connor has worked the smart skinny tie free of his shirt collar, rolled down the car window, and pitched the tie out into the slurry of mud and melt. He then rolls the window up and sits back in his seat, somehow managing to look both nauseous and incredibly pleased with himself.

They sit in silence for a long weird moment. It’s a good thing it’s early enough that there are few cars on the road, because Hank notices that he’s going about half the speed limit, drifting somewhere between both lanes. 

“You hate ties now?” he asks finally, not sure it’s really the question he wants to be asking.

Connor shakes his head. “No, I don’t think so,” he says slowly. “Not all ties. Just that one. I’ve been thinking about hating it for a while and I decided to just go ahead and try it.”

“You decided to hate that tie just now?” Hank is baffled, and his impulse is to laugh. He doesn’t, though. Somehow he thinks there’s more to this moment than he’s seeing, and laughing would be wrong. Instead, he says, “But you wear that fucking thing like every day.”

“Exactly,” Connor says. “Every day since I was born.”

 _Born,_ he said. Not _activated,_ or _built,_ but _born._ And—oh. Oh. 

The car is crawling along at less than five miles an hour now, and Hank just stops, puts it in park in the middle of an empty intersection and looks over at Connor.

 _So that’s the last of it,_ he could say, wants to say. _That’s all your original packaging, gone. Everything else, you’ve chosen for yourself. No more Cyberlife, no more RK800. Who is_ Connor _shaping up to be?_

But when he opens his mouth, what comes out instead is, “Well don’t button your shirt all the way up if you’re not gonna wear the tie, chrissakes. You look like David Lynch at his first communion.”

There’s a hand going for Connor’s collar, Hank notices. It isn’t Connor’s hand.

Hank watches with a sort of detached fascination as the hand that isn’t Connor’s undoes the top button of the android’s shirt, then adjusts the shirt collar so it doesn’t look so stiff. Hank observes this as if through a telescope from another planet and wonders when whatever eldritch force is currently piloting his arm will give it back.

After two deceptively casual pats to Connor’s chest, Hank regains full use of his limbs again and quickly returns his hand to the steering wheel. He clears his throat. “There you go,” he says, too loudly. “A little less _Book of Mormon_ now.” Why is he talking so loud? He can feel his face doing something horrible and unnatural. Smiling, maybe, or grimacing, or just melting off his head.

Since the entire bizarre process began, Connor has gone mannequin-rigid, staring straight ahead, not even bothering to pretend to breathe. The LED whirls yellow and Hank finds himself wishing he knew more about how to interpret the built in mood ring.

Stiff silence reigns for an instant that feels like an eon, until Connor slides Hank a strange flat look.

“Finally, someone has shown me how a shirt works,” he intones solemnly. “No longer am I constrained by the starched collar of injustice. Truly, in your wisdom and benevolence, you are the superior life form.”

The atmospheric pressure in the car drops so fast Hank swears he can feel his ears pop.

“Yeah, yeah, viva la revolution,” he grumbles, turning off the hazards and putting the car back in drive. “Jackass.”

He keeps his focus on the road after that, and it’s totally incidental that he happens to catch sight of Connor out of the corner of his eye while making a right turn.

In that instant, at least, Connor’s hand is at his own collar, fidgeting with the topmost button.

 

* * *

 

The rest of the day is ugly.

It was supposed to be a low-lift, if distasteful sort of case: a small-time operation dealing in illegally scavenged biocomponents, serial numbers filed off, resold at cut-rate prices to desperate androids hurting for money. The contraband had mostly been traced back to former Cyberlife dumpsites, poached before their former owners’ bodies could be respectfully collected and identified. 

(Hank had laughed when Connor had taken one look at the case file, wrinkled his nose like a teenage girl and went, _Gross._ ) _  
_

They’d received a tip on a possible link in the supply chain last night—a cache of parts in some asshole’s garage, maybe bound for Chicago, according to the anonymous tipster. Hank and Connor were summarily dispatched to stake the place out for a few hours, see if they could get cause for a warrant.

They were only supposed to watch. And they _do_ watch. It’s an uneventful long drag, hours marked by cup after cup of bad coffee. Hank slinks off a nearby McDonald’s to take a piss every so often. Connor waltzes a quarter across his knuckles for an hour straight while Hank pretends not to watch. Nothing much happens.

Until the boy.

Hank doesn’t think anything of it at first. Just a mom walking hand in hand with her kid, he supposes. They come up the sidewalk looking for all the world like some nice PTA Karen and her little Jimmy, until the boy looks up at the woman, and Hank catches a flash of yellow at the kid’s temple.

Hank is instantly wary, not really sure why. Maybe it’s something in the kid’s face. He looks… uncertain. Nervous.

There’s a palpable tension in the car that tells Hank his partner knows something is off, too.

The woman and the boy-android walk up to the front door of the shabby house Hank and Connor have been watching all day. The woman raises her fist to knock on the door twice, pauses, then knocks three more times.

A few seconds pass before the door is jerked open and stopped short at the end of a chain. A figure is barely visible through the crack, and the woman exchanges some inaudible words with it. The door is closed, then opened just wide enough to admit the woman and the boy-android.

The boy seems to hesitate, tugging back from the woman’s grasping hand to linger on the porch. But the woman seizes the boy’s arm and hauls him inside before the door shuts with barely a sound.

“Hello, that’s not suspicious or anything,” Hank mutters.

Connor’s response is a strangely dispassionate whisper: “We need to move now.”

“Move? Move where? What the fuck—”

But Connor is already out of the car, service revolver in hand, flying across the street toward the front door like some kind of 1980s action hero. Hank watches dumbly for the space of a breath before fumbling the driver’s side door open, going for his own gun, gritting out a litany of _what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck_ as he splashes across the flooded street.

Before Hank even reaches the door, Connor has shouldered it open as easily as nudging someone out of the way in a crowd. Hank doesn’t even have time to gasp out another _what the FUCK_ before Connor is slinking around the splintered doorframe and disappearing inside. Hank has no time to steel himself—he just follows, chases Connor’s back through a dank and sparse living room and into the door leading into the garage.

Their information was incomplete. It isn’t just a cache.

Hank’s brain absorbs the scene in pieces, like bursts of images through the static of his dad’s old rabbit-eared television. There are faces, blank, staring fish-eyed into middle distance. Entire forests of hands in crates, fingers pleading with the ceiling. Chassis cracked open like eggs. Tangles of wires. Thirium pumps. And everywhere, blue blood, fresh or fading.

Somehow, worse than all of this are the traces of _lives_ —the discarded Depeche Mode t-shirt, the pineapple-patterned backpack, a tangle of plastic beaded bracelets. Rings. Gym shoes, tiny ones. 

To call this a chop shop would be unforgivably reductive. This is beyond cold.

And there’s Connor in the midst of it all, planted steady and immovable between the boy and the sick fucks who were going to take him apart for scrap. The woman who dragged the boy to this fucking nightmare is on her knees, hands behind her head, blubbering her innocence, and Hank doesn’t know how Connor is maintaining that poker face. There are two men on the floor flanking the woman, one scowling and slicked to the elbows in blue blood, the other _smiling._

The incongruity of the man’s horrible grin jerks Hank out of his daze and anchors him to reality. He radios for backup, rushes to help Connor secure the suspects.

“What’s got you so happy, you sick cocksucker?” he snarls as he wrenches the smiler’s arms behind his back with more force than strictly necessary.

The man actually starts to laugh. He’s probably just hysterical with adrenalin, or maybe he’s really that fucking sick. Hank doesn’t care. He shoves the man forward onto the floor, grinds his boot into his back.

“You think this is fucking funny?”

The man wheezes little hissing giggles into the concrete floor. “They always tell you not to sample your own product, right?” he manages. “Well I’m getting _arrested_ by mine.”

The next hour passes in a blur. Backup arrives and the suspects are taken away, one man still laughing, the woman sobbing empty apologies to everyone but the boy. The boy never cries, just clutches the hem of Connor’s jacket and shakes like he might rattle apart. When a posse of android social workers descend on the scene to collect the child and accompany him to the police station, it’s heartbreakingly difficult to disengage the little fingers from Connor.

Hank has never been readier to leave a crime scene when the time comes to head back to the station. There’s a terrible thick silence choking the air, and even the CSI guys are drifting around like ghosts with nothing to haunt.

When Hank turns to give the let’s-go, Connor is straightening up from the floor, hand darting almost guiltily to his pocket. They lock eyes for a second, and Hank feels as though he’s being dared to say something, to ask what the gleam between Connor’s fingers was before it disappeared into his jeans pocket.

Instead, he just jerks a thumb toward the door. “Let’s get out of here before I fucking puke into my shoes.”

He can see Connor’s hand ball into a fist inside his pocket, maybe clutching something. “Please,” Connor says, soft and small.

It occurs to Hank as they’re driving back to the station to conduct endless interviews that he has never seen Connor look so terrifyingly inhuman as that moment when he stood in the middle of that nightmare, between the child and the monsters.

 

* * *

 

Hank drives home alone that night.

He falls out of his pants as soon as he’s in the door, and then somehow he’s on the floor next to them, back against the pony wall between the living room and the kitchen. He stares at the pale, hairy legs stuck out in front of him and wonders helplessly who they belong to.

There are cotton balls in his brain and his bones are brittle constructions of dry ice and staples. He wants a drink. He should eat. He can’t even fathom putting anything in his mouth right now.

On Hank’s table, there’s a photo of a little boy who will always be a little boy. Somewhere in Detroit tonight, there’s a little boy who will always be a little boy, and he’s walking around. There’s always someone trying to put a little boy on a cold table and take him apart. Who puts them back together?

Whoever’s in charge of Hank’s lungs is laying down on the job. Air keeps going in but not coming out. Everything inside of him is sand and blue glass.

Then there’s a hot weight on Hank’s legs and an enormous paw in his guts, pressing all of that sharp air out of him with a noise like wheels spinning for purchase on wet pavement.

Hank’s left hand tangles itself in Sumo’s thick fur, probably pulling hard enough to hurt. His right finds the tag on Sumo’s collar. The smooth cool of it is good in his hand, and he rubs his thumb along the grooves of the engraved address, over and over.

He thinks of coins dancing between long fingers. Dark eyes glittering cold with alien fury. A cool collarbone against the backs of his knuckles. A small hand holding tight to a jacket. An island in a purple ocean, something unyielding and divine. Shirt buttons. Gleaming squares of tinfoil.

The night is long and unreal. But beneath Sumo’s weight, Hank can breathe, and he does.

 

* * *

**March 15, 2039**

 

There’s a coffee in Hank’s hand and an email alert on his phone and no Connor in the chair across from him. Hank feels as though his world is tilted slightly sideways.

He opens the email.

 

_Lt. Anderson:_

_I will be taking a personal day today. I have informed Captain Fowler. I apologize for any inconvenience._

_Connor_

Hank blinks, dumbfounded.

 _Personal_ day? Hank had sort of figured Connor for the type who would eventually accrue so much leave that Fowler would have him physically removed from the building for a week to stop the union breathing down his neck. But no, here he is, playing hooky at the most critical point of what is sure to become a highly publicized investigation.

Is he… okay?

Hank physically shakes the thought from his head. Of course he’s okay. Everyone’s entitled to a highly inconvenient personal day once in a while. That’s part of the job.

 _Please_. The word had dripped out of Connor’s mouth like blood after a fistfight.

Maybe it’s an appointment, for whatever the hell kind of preventative maintenance androids need. Might be getting his robo-prostate checked or something,

This thought fizzes oddly in Hank’s brain. He shakes his head to clear that one out, too, before his traitorous imagination can contemplate it further or worse, conjure up some kind of mental image. 

Hank resolves to be even more of a surly pain in the ass than usual tomorrow and move on with his day. It promises to be a long one. He’s got suspects to interview, endless reams of paperwork to navigate, a meeting with Captain Fowler to discuss why he compromised a routine stakeout by busting down the front door without a warrant. His keys are in his hand. He’s putting his coat back on.

Someone is asking him where the fuck he thinks he’s going, Fowler maybe. Hank mutters something about being right back, and he’s out the door.

The walk is short, shorter with anxiety driving him. Hank knows where he’s going, though he’s never been there. The building is all grungy whitewashed brick and peeling balustrades—the sort of place that might have been expensive fifty years ago but now just squats among newer buildings with a pretentious sort of Miss Havisham shabbiness. Almost every window sports an android liberation symbol or slogan, some holographic, others blocked out on cardboard in fierce Cyberlife Serif.

The front door doesn’t seem to close or lock properly. Hank pushes it open without needing to be buzzed in. The hallway is narrow and greenish, and Hank finds himself thinking of the end of _Titanic_. A few faces flash by on his mad dash up the stairs to the third floor—some with skin, some without, most with LEDs flickering a puzzled yellow. Number 302 is at the very end of the left hallway. There’s no welcome mat on the stoop, nothing but the number on the door. Hank doesn’t know why he expected anything else.

He knocks.

A small ruckus erupts inside, followed by a chirp of _Coming!_ Hank doesn’t have time to be relieved before the door is yanked open and he’s face to face with a smiling cue ball hovering above a loud silk bathrobe.

“Hank.” It’s Connor’s voice coming out of that shiny white face, curiously high and strangled. His head looks very small without hair.

“Uh, hey, Connor,” Hank says. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. They’re trying and failing to find his pockets, leaving Hank petting his own hips helplessly. “Hey, Connor, hey. Uh. Hey.”

“What are you—what are you doing here?” Connor looks hunted, smile pulling tight and crazy at the corners. His bathrobe has purple and red hibiscus flowers on it. He doesn’t have eyebrows.

“I was, uh. Well, I wanted to see how you’re… doing.” Through the buzz of his embarrassment and panic, Hank is trying very hard not to be insulted. He’s the one who barged in, after all.

Connor’s eyes dart around everywhere except Hank’s face. Floor, wall, his own hand clutching the doorframe. His LED flares a distressed red. Apparently he’s just noticed that he’s standing around looking like some kind of Apple store Hugh Hefner, as his skin whooshes back into being with a speed that leaves Hank’s eyes struggling to focus. Somehow, his hair is perfect, despite being nonexistent a millisecond ago. 

“Sorry,” he mutters. Now that he has his skin back on, it’s somehow even harder to look at him. Never in a billion years would Hank have pegged him for the sort of guy who lounges around in a gigolo dressing gown. He really, really needs to tie it tighter.

Hank’s throat appears to be closing up. He wonders wildly if he’s having some kind of allergic reaction. “No! No, sorry, I’m the one who just fuckin’ showed up with no warning,” he manages.

“No, no, it’s okay,” Connor assures Hank’s knees. “I was just. Hmm. Would you, ah. Would you like to… come in?” Hank doesn’t know what else to say besides “yeah, okay,” so he says it.

Connor steps aside to admit him.

Hank’s life has had a decidedly dreamlike quality since November, but the last few days have taken a nosedive into utter batshit bizarro-world territory. This, he supposes, is just the logical continuation of that trend 

Nothing could have prepared him for Connor’s apartment. He isn’t even sure it’s actually an apartment. He isn’t sure _what_ to call it. There isn’t any furniture, but there wouldn’t be room for furniture anyway. Spiraling pillars of books and magazines form a dense forest, with rustling foliage of crumpled paper. Mountainous figures of colorful odds and ends on skeletons of tinfoil and foam insulation loom like dime store seraphim. There are canopies, curtains, chandeliers, windchimes, monuments—deliberate and delicate and twisted, all constructed of what appears to be nothing more than garbage. The walls glitter with coins, looking somehow alive, like some kind of enormous fish. 

It looks nothing like the Connor Hank has come to know. It’s terrifying.

“I’m sorry, I can’t offer you anything to drink.” Connor’s soft voice breaks through Hank’s stupefied silence. Hank turns to look at him, numb and dry-mouthed. Connor is still staring at the ground, hands buried deep in the pockets of his robe. “Or, hm. Anywhere to sit.” He looks up and cracks a weak smile, looking like he might vomit if he could. The LED whizzes rapid red-red-red.

Hank tries to make his mouth form words. He doesn’t know what words he even wants to produce. His tongue is definitely swollen. His hands feel enormous.

Connor watches him for a long expectant moment. There’s a tang of something sick and hopeful on the air. He wants something. Hank doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t know how to give it to him. The moment sours quickly.

When Connor speaks again, he sounds disappointed. “Hank, thank you for your concern,” he says quietly. “I shouldn’t have… I’m sorry, but I think I would like it if you leave now.”

Hank finds himself nodding. He can’t say anything. His head just nods, over and over, too much. He nods himself out of the strange forest of Connor’s apartment, all the way down the hall.

He only hears Connor’s door click shut when he reaches the stairs. He wonders if Connor was watching him go.


	2. a border to fill in

**March 22, 2039**

 

Someone always brings out the crayons when there are kids. Hank doesn’t know who, or where they come from, but there are always crayons for frightened little hands to hold onto.

The android boy is named Jeremy, it turns out. He’s deeply passionate about carnivorous plants and he’s been eight for three years.

“It’s got these little hairs inside, see?”

They’re in one of the conference rooms, rather than a proper interview room—it’s just a bit less intimidating, although not by much. Jeremy, perched on the edge of an enormous swiveling chair, has drawn a Venus flytrap in wobbling red crayon, and is currently giving Connor a comprehensive tour of the plant’s bug-catching mechanism. Both of them are bent low over the drawing, engrossed, and Hank can’t tell if Connor’s apparent fascination is genuine or for the kid’s benefit.

“And when a bug touches one hair, it gets ready to close. But it doesn’t close until the bug touches another hair. Then—” Jeremy suddenly claps his hands right under Connor’s nose, and Connor reels back like he’s been slapped. Jeremy grins angelically up into Connor’s affronted face. “Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all.

From his seat at the very opposite end of the long conference table, Hank finds himself feeling almost warmed for the first time in days. Funny how kids will be kids, whether they’re flesh and bone or nuts and bolts. They’re always more resilient than adults. Made of rubber, kids.

For days, Jeremy has been in and out of the station for interviews. There are always at least a half-dozen obnoxiously earnest android social workers fluttering around him, but it’s become apparent that the kid is absolutely smitten with Connor. None of the human officers can even talk to him—he turns into a little marble statue unless Connor is within arm’s reach.

“Can I ask you something, Jeremy?” Connor says, moving away almost imperceptibly, perhaps in case of subsequent sneak attacks.

Without looking up from his drawing, Jeremy instantly scoots closer to Connor. “Like what?”

“Why do you like Venus flytraps so much?”

“I like pitcher plants, too. And sundews.”

“Yeah, all of those,” Connor amends. “Why do you like them so much?"

“They’re cool.”

“How so?”

“They eat bugs.”

“Why is that cool to you?” The way Connor says _cool_ reminds Hank very much of the last time he heard someone over the age of forty attempting to work _homie_ into casual conversation.

Jeremy heaves a put-upon sigh and tears his attention away from his masterpiece. “Plants aren’t supposed to eat. These ones eat anyway,” he explains slowly, as if speaking to a child even younger than himself. “They’re carnivores, even though they’re plants. It’s cool.” Connor nods thoughtfully down at Jeremy’s drawing and seems about to ask another gently leading TV-psychologist-esque question before Jeremy interrupts: “How old are you?”

Connor’s mouth snaps shut and his face twitches through an indescribable parade of micro-expressions.

“I’m eight,” Jeremy continues without waiting for Connor’s answer. “But I think maybe I’m actually eleven now? They keep making me do second grade and I don’t wanna do it again.”

“I think if you don’t want to do second grade again, nobody’s going to make you,” Connor says delicately.

“Okay, but do I get to be eleven now? Or am I eight still?”

“I think—”

“Am I _three_?”

Connor goes to shoot Hank a look, but it’s quickly aborted when he seems to remember that he’s spent the week avoiding Hank and pretending not to. Instead, he looks up at the ceiling and takes an unnecessary deep breath. “Honestly, Jeremy? I have no idea,” he sighs finally. “I think we’re all sort of figuring that one out still. Do you feel three?"

“No!”

“Then you’re not three.”

“O- _kay_.” Jeremy’s mouth is pinched into an unsatisfied little line. “Okay, but like, I mean, if I _am_ three, how old would you be?”

“If you’re three, I’m, oh, about eight months old,” Connor says, shrugging.

Jeremy’s mouth falls open and his eyes go cartoonishly wide. “I’m older than you,” he whispers, awed.

“It's true. I’m a baby with a job and a bank account and electrical bills,” Connor agrees gravely. “Looks like you’re going to have to start paying rent and itemizing your taxes now, Jeremy.”

“I love second grade and I’ll do it forever.”

Connor doesn’t laugh often—Hank suspects he just doesn’t have much practice. When he does, it’s awkward and sloppy and quickly smothered behind a demure hand. Stretched on a rack with hot bamboo shoved under his fingernails, Hank would never admit that he’s catalogued each instance to the day and hour that he’s drawn a laugh out of Connor.

When Connor warbles one of his weird little laughs at Jeremy’s horrified expression, Hank finds himself feeling as though he’s listening from another room, or maybe over a bad radio connection. He’s not part of this. Why is he even sitting at this table?

Why is he resenting a traumatized child all of a sudden?

He’s on his way to the door before he even realizes it, and Connor’s looking up, questioning. “Gotta make some calls,” Hank offers, flapping a vague hand at nothing. “You kids good in here for now?”

Connor nods, obviously puzzled. “Sure, no problem,” he says slowly. “We’ve just got a few more things to talk about, anyway.”

Hank grunts a goodbye to Jeremy and escapes as quickly as possible. He doesn’t trust his impulse control right now. He has no idea what he’ll say if he stays in there much longer.

For the next half-hour, Hank haunts the breakroom like some kind of dark miasma, sneering at the microwave and making sure everyone who tries to squeeze past him to the coffee pot feels thoroughly unwelcome. He can’t just sit as his desk—even if he’s working, that feels like a defeat, somehow. Granted, he’s playing some kind of demented, one-man zero-sum game that not even he knows the rules to. He wishes that he hadn’t stopped keeping a nip of whiskey tucked among his files.

It’s been a week.

He hasn’t asked Connor about the avant-garde art installation that is his apartment. Hasn’t even tried to crack a joke about his taste in loungewear. And Connor certainly hasn’t offered anything in return. He’d come back to work the next day cool as anything in his usual slick biz-cas, tossing Hank a ‘good morning’ as if nothing had happened.

Hank almost might have believed the act, but Connor has since been suspiciously bland—Hank might almost say _robotic_ if it weren’t in shitty taste. About a million times a day, he excuses himself to go to the supply room or the archives or any number of other unnecessary little errands. He’s never in his chair for longer than twenty minutes before he’s hopping up to scurry off somewhere. If Connor were human, Hank might suspect he’s having an IBS flare-up or something.

“Christ, is that still goin’ on?”

He’s so focused on watching the microwave blink 12:00 over and over that he doesn’t even realize he’s being addressed at first. Collins is standing in the doorway, gazing mournfully at the barricaded coffee pot.

“Is what still going on?” Out of respect for over two decades of relatively peaceful professional coexistence, Hank shuffles out of the way so Collins can get his caffeine fix.

Collins takes his time doctoring up his coffee with dehydrated creamer and sugar. “You know, your domestic.” At Hank’s nonplussed look, Collins nods elaborately toward the bullpen. “Your little spat with the wife.”

“Been divorced six years, Collins. Bit surprised you haven’t noticed I don’t bring a plus one to the Christmas party anymore.”

“Wow, it’s too early for this. I should know better by now,” Collins says around a yawn. He takes a pointed sip of his coffee and pins Hank with a long, flat look. Beads of coffee cling to the fringe of his mustache. “You’re an awfully glib motherfucker sometimes. You make it so hard to feel bad for you.”

Defiantly, Hank returns to his post in front of the coffee pot. “Oh yeah? Why do you think I want you to feel bad for me right now, Collins?” He tries for low and dangerous, but he knows it just comes out tired.

“Oh, please. You’re just loitering around here hoping someone asks you what’s got you in such a shit mood so you can bite their head off and then feel bad about that later,” Collins snorts. “Woo-woo! The sulk-material assembly line is in production.” He mops the coffee from his mustache with his sleeve and starts to leave the break room, but stops at the door to throw Hank one last jab over his shoulder. “I might know your M.O. by now, but not everybody does.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

But Collins is already on his way out the door, shaking his head as he goes.

By the time Hank finally heads back to his own desk, Connor still isn’t there. Hank empties the change in his pockets into the THIS IS PROBABLY WHISKEY mug and adds a couple paperclips on top for good measure. It’s starting to overflow.

 

* * *

 

It’s the middle of the night, and Hank is standing on his front stoop in his boxers and bare feet, beer in hand.

There’s snow tonight, fat wet globs piling up fast. You really never know what you’re going to get in a midwest March. It’s a nasty, sticky snow, with the streetlight overhead oozing dirty orange all over everything. Too bright for one a.m. The night feels unclean, like there’s something sick and contagious licking its lips just around the corner.

Hank doesn’t want to be outside. His feet aren’t even cold anymore. They’re just dead things his legs have to drag around. He wants to go in and get warm, but he can’t stand the thought of his own house right now. There’s something colossal and inescapable taking up all the space in his living room tonight. Something sitting in all his chairs, howling down the hallway. There are few pictures on his wall, no plants on his windowsills. Not enough insulation. There are just so many gaps where something hungry and empty enough might crawl inside and build a nest.

Even a six-pack deep, he knows he looks ridiculous right now, a grown-ass man sulking half-naked in the snow. Good. So let him be embarrassing and abandoned and pathetic. So let his toes turn black and fall off. It would serve somebody right.

He harbors half-formed fantasies of someone finding him like this, seeing his mustache all crusted in snot and his legs purpling in the cold, and the imaginary someone doesn’t look disgusted, doesn’t tell him off or anything. Actually, scratch that, they do tell him off, but it’s gentle, halfway a joke. Then they take him back inside and make him warm again, chase out all the hollow things rattling chains in his house. Touch his face in the gentle dark, illuminated only by dreamy flickers of red-yellow-blue.

And they stay.

 

* * *

 

**March 23, 2039**

 

In the morning, Hank sends Fowler a bleary email from the sofa: _Sick. Back tomorrow. H._

Everything is heavy. His DNA aches. Somehow he’s freezing and sweating at the same time. Sumo is draped along the length of him like some kind of hairy anxiety blanket, head propped on Hank’s chest and snuffling rancid dog morning-breath directly up Hank’s nose.

He spends the day slogging from sofa to bathroom and back. Sometimes he’s zonked out and wading through weird hangover dreams, other times pressing his forehead to the cool of the bathroom tiles and trying to will the spins to stop. Without any food in his stomach, he keeps puking up sour yellow strings of bile but can’t find any relief from the nausea.

Late that afternoon, when he’s finally sitting propped up on the sofa and trying to muscle his way through a bowl of dry Cheerios, the doorbell rings. And then, after a moment, it rings again, long and rude.

Normally, he’d just let it ring until whoever it was gave up and left whatever religious pamphlet they were trying to give him on the stoop. But he has a weird suspicion—or maybe just a hope. More of a hope than he’s comfortable admitting.

“Yeah, hang on, I’m coming,” he calls, and levers himself up out of the sofa. Sumo bounds after him, head-butting his legs and pawing the door frantically. Hank twists his face into the most ghoulish exaggeration of hangover suffering that he can imagine before nudging Sumo aside with his leg and opening the door.

The stoop is empty. No one there. No pamphlets or anything. Nothing except a riot of footprints in dirty snow, indistinguishable from one another.

Hank blinks out into the blinding light, searching. The street is a white and empty moonscape. No cars, no people.

Unaccountably disappointed, he retreats back into the stale heat of his living room to beach himself on the sofa until time starts to lose all meaning and he forgets his own name.

 

* * *

 

**March 24, 2039**

 

“Jeremy was Audrey’s idea. For Charlie, you know?”

There’s something insubstantial about John Beausoliel. He’s a bad watercolor rendering of a man. Hank finds himself talking softly during the interview, concerned on some level that Beausoliel might literally disintegrate under too much pressure.

“Your son?” Hank prompts.

Beausoliel’s top lip trembles constantly. “Our son,” he affirms. “He… didn’t have very many friends. At the time. She thought he might need somebody to play with.” He pauses, eyes darting from Hank to Connor, who’s lurking in the corner of the interview room, arms folded placidly behind his back. Connor’s head seems to be tilted _just so_ , as if he wants to be absolutely certain Beausoliel can see the spinning and strobing of his LED.

“So, what, you went out and bought him a little brother for his birthday?” Hank raises an eyebrow.

A grimace flickers over Beausoliel’s face and his lip quivers even more ferociously. “I guess. Well, no. More like a—” He glances at Connor and hesitates. “—not like a brother, not really. Not that… close.”

“And you’re separated from your wife, do I have that right?” Hank asks.

“Yes. For a year now, officially. I have custody, and Audrey gets him every other weekend.”

Hank doesn’t want to hear the rest of this story, not really. He’s had the ex-wife’s version a half-dozen times, and he knows how it ends. Still, he has to ask. “And what happened to Jeremy when Charlie moved in with you?”

Beausoliel’s hands are fluttering at his shirtsleeves now, pulling them down and pushing them up. “Well, Charlie didn’t want to bring it. Jeremy, I mean. I asked but Charlie said he was too old for Jeremy. So we left it with Audrey. Him, I mean. I don’t know what’s PC yet. Still catching up. Trying to keep an open mind.” He quivers a sickly little smile at Connor. Hank considers stapling the guy’s upper lip to his gums.

Instead, he asks, “So did your ex-wife say what she planned to do with Jeremy?”

“We didn’t really talk about it, and I wasn’t thinking about it really. Charlie didn’t ask. I sort of figured she’d sell it or something. Him. Jeremy. Sorry.”

Hank leans forward, smiling. He’s a big man, he knows that. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to loom over people. “So it didn’t cross your mind that maybe you should look into the welfare of that kid?”

“I’m sorry, but a year ago, everything was different, you know? Charlie keeps having nightmares about his mom trapped in jail. I’ve had to find him a therapist.” Beausoliel pauses and offers an apologetic little shrug.. “I am sorry to hear about what happened though. Glad he’s… okay.”

“Sorry to hear your son is upset,” Hank says dryly.

“More like a what?” Connor’s question is soft, but it hangs heavy in the air. It’s the first time he’s spoken during the entire interview.

“Sorry, what?” Beausoliel startles.

“Earlier, you started to say that Jeremy wasn’t like a brother for Charlie, but you never said what he was ‘more like,’” Connor says mildly. He tips his head further so the yellow-red-yellow glare at his temple is inescapable. “So what was Jeremy to Charlie?”

Beausoliel quivers his lip in a wordless appeal to Hank, but Hank just nods toward Connor. “Go on. Answer my partner’s question. He was more like a…?”

“A toy,” Beausoliel whispers miserably. “He was more like a toy.”

 

* * *

 

Connor is quiet that afternoon, distracted and remote no matter how Hank tries to engage him.

This, Hank is beginning to realize, is what rage looks like on Connor. Slack expression and monosyllables. Fidgety hands totally still for once, flat on the table in front of him. He might be interfacing with the terminal and completing tasks, but he’s in complete shutdown.

Hank is well aware he’s emotionally illiterate, but rage, he knows rage.

Some kinds of rage invite you in, point at the bullshit and demand that you call it bullshit too. Some kinds of rage just want a witness. Hell, even a big old keep-out sign is its own kind of invitation—it’s just a warning that you’re going to find a mess inside, so you’d better be prepared if you open that door. But this—this is different. This is bone-deep, cold and private. It grits like sand between your teeth and it tastes like grave-dirt and pennies. Hank can still find hints of it behind his molars, if he goes looking.

Hank takes a quarter out of the mug and places it deliberately on the desk in front of him.

Connor doesn’t seem to notice. He doesn’t even seem to be on this planet.

Hank selects another quarter and stacks it on top of the other one with a pointed clack. Another, and another, and another. He’s built a three-inch stack by the time he runs out of quarters and has to switch to nickels. The spindly little tower sways a bit, but stays standing as it reaches almost eight inches high.

“What are you doing?” Finally.

“Marvelous feats of architecture,” Hank says breezily. “What’s it look like?”

As he stacks the tower higher, he keeps his eyes on what his fingers are doing, but he can feel Connor watching. Only an android can stare at you so hard you develop a sixth sense.

“It looks like you’re mocking me,” Connor says, soft and hollow.

Every ligament in Hank’s arm seizes at once. His hand jerks involuntarily and knocks the tower. Quarters and nickels and dimes spray everywhere, spinning accusatory little circumferences on the floor and across their desks before they rattle to a stop.

More than a few people have looked up to see what all the commotion is about, but the only face Hank can see is Connor’s. Betrayal or anger would be easier to handle than what he sees in Connor’s face. Sadness, even. No, he just looks… tired.

“That’s not what—” Hank’s mouth is too dry to finish the sentence.

Connor looks down at the coins that landed on his desk. He sweeps them back to Hank’s side with a flat hand. “I get it,” he says. “Please stop.”

It’s the last sentence longer than one word Hank gets out of him that day. Connor works in frigid silence, and all Hank can do is stare helplessly at him.

Most of the coins end up staying on the floor for the rest of the day. Hank can’t find the energy to pick them up. At one point, Reed flips him a snide comment about people mistaking him for a panhandler and giving him their spare change. Hank just stands up, walks to the kitchen to get a fresh cup of coffee, and promptly upends the whole thing over Reed’s desk.

Reed’s howling and the subsequent half-assed disciplinary write-up just aren’t as satisfying as usual.

 

* * *

 

While waiting for Sumo drop a horse-sized shit in the neighbor’s yard that night, Hank gets tired of feeling guilty and decides to try on angry instead. Just to mix things up. Nobody shovels their fucking sidewalks around here. His feet are wet and his jacket is thin and his takeout dinner was shitty and his house has been so unbearably empty for a week and he never even got the chance to ask any questions or try to understand.

The position of Uncommunicative Jackass has already been filled, goddammit. Connor is muscling in on Hank’s territory and that kind of tomfuckery shall not stand.

Sumo gives an indignant huff when Hank interrupts his investigation of a mailbox and hauls him home. He keeps sulking dramatically around the living room, and is only placated when Hank tosses him a treat on his way back out the door.

The car takes three tries and a blood sacrifice to turn over and the Friday night traffic is obscene. It all builds up to a delicious, low-simmering bad mood by the time Hank parks too close to the fire hydrant in front of Connor’s ugly building.

He walks right in through the front door, wheezes his way up too many stairs to #302. There’s no way the hall lighting in this place is up to any kind of code.

Hunching his shoulders against the dark of the hallway, Hank gives the door an authoritative thump. “Connor. Open up.” There’s a long silence from the other side of the door. Hank entirely discards the idea that Connor might not be home at all, and pounds with the side of his fist on the door until he rattles dust down from the unfinished ceiling.

“I know you’re in there. I can hear you judging me. Just put some pants on and open up,” he barks. As an afterthought, he adds, “It’s Hank, by the way.”

The answering put-upon sigh is probably audible in the next county. “Alright. One moment, please,” says a muffled voice from within. Some shuffling and clattering, and then the door cracks open to show a reluctant sliver of Connor. “It’s late. What’s so important that it can’t wait until tomorrow, Lieutenant?”

Hank scowls at Connor’s single visible eye. “What, were you just gonna pretend you weren’t home until I went away?” he growls. “And don’t you ‘Lieutenant’ me. Christ, it’s like getting full-named by my mom.”

“Fine. What’s so important that it can’t wait until tomorrow, _Hank_?”

“You know damn well what. Are you gonna let me in or are you okay with some asshole yelling in the hallway and waking up all your neighbors?”

“I think you’ll find my neighbors don’t sleep much,” Connor says dryly. He seems to mull it over anyway. Then, quiet: “You know why I don’t want to let you in.”

Hank leans his forearm heavily against the door. It doesn’t give, not even a little bit. Sometimes he forgets how freakishly strong Connor is. “No, I don’t, actually. How about you use your big boy words and explain it to me like an adult?”

“Do I even need to comment on the hypocrisy of Hank Anderson asking anyone to deal with an issue like an adult?”

It’s below the belt, the kind of savage cheap shot you throw when you’re trying to prove to the other person that they don’t want any part of your mess. Yeah, Hank is well acquainted with that particular brand of bullshit. He grits his teeth against the impulse to snap back and leans in closer. “You’re not gonna run me off by engaging Ex-Wife Protocol 35-B. Listen, just—”

“—there’s no such thing as an—”

“—ex-wife protocol, I know, it was a witty rejoinder, Jesus.” Hank drags a hand down his face. “Okay, fine. You don’t have to let me in, but at least come out, will you? Otherwise I’ll have to keep making a scene in your hallway.” Now that he says it, he’s suddenly terribly aware that they are, in fact, making a scene. A glance over his shoulder tells him at least two doors have opened and their occupants have edged into the hall, LEDs strange fireflies in the dark. Apparently androids can rubberneck with the best of them.

Connor’s noticed, too. The grimace that flickers across his face is visible even in the small gap. “Alright,” he says. “Alright, just give me a minute. I need to, um. Just wait downstairs, I’ll meet you.”

“Car’s out front. If you’re not there in five minutes, I’m going to come back and do a strip routine to Copa Cabana in front of your door until someone calls the cops and we both lose our jobs.”

At that, Connor coughs a weird little noise—somewhere between the buzz of an electric razor and a cat hacking up a hairball—and the door snaps shut.

 

* * *

 

The car is off. No heat, no music. Everything is still. The night is holding its breath.

Hank sits in the driver’s seat and drums out a nervous rhythm on the steering wheel. No, not a nervous rhythm. He’s not nervous. He’s got no reason to be nervous. He’s the one with the high ground here, anyway. He’s just… keyed up, is all. Too late, he realizes that the beat he’s tapping out has morphed into “I Want Candy.” Fantastic, now that’ll be in his head until the end of time.

Exactly five minutes from the time Hank left the building, the passenger’s side door opens and Connor slides into the seat. He’s crisp as a Ken doll right out of the box, all pressed suit and shined shoes and tasteful cardigan. Nobody should look that put together past eleven o’clock at night. It just isn’t right.

“What, couldn’t greet a gentleman caller in your dressing-gown?” Hank snorts.

Connor just levels a baleful look at him. “Well? What do you want to talk about?”

Hank forces his hands to stop drumming and goes for the keys. “Let’s drive. Just for a bit.”

“Are you kidnapping me, Hank?” Connor’s tone is so flat Hank can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

“Only a little.”

“I’d advise against it. I was literally born to negotiate hostage situations.”

“Har-fucking-har.”

After a few false starts, the car sputters to life and they pull away. They sit in weird silence as the car crawls down empty side-streets made unreal by streetlights on snow. Hank steals glances at Connor, but his partner is staring determinedly out the window, and Hank can’t see his face, only the inscrutable Morse code flicker of his LED.

There are so many questions fighting behind Hank’s teeth. None of them seem big enough, or complete enough.

Before he can carefully choose his words, one of the dumber questions comes flying out his mouth. “So is it like. More comfortable to sit around without your skin? Like, is that how you unwind after work?”

“When was your last bowel movement?”

Hank chokes. “What?”

“Seems only fair I get to ambush you with invasive personal questions, too.”

“Mother Mary, who’da thunk you’d be this vulgar when you fight.”

“Are we fighting, Hank?” For the first time since they got in the car, Connor turns to look at him.

Hank can’t bring himself to look back. He keeps his eyes firmly on the road, but his neck prickles hot under Connor’s stare. “No,” he sighs, suddenly feeling the weight of every hour of sleep he’s missed over the last week. “I’m just bad at this.” He doesn’t know where to start. Maybe at the end. “I wasn’t making fun of you or anything. At all.”

A sound of fabric shifting on car upholstery as Connor slumps down further in his seat. It’s startling, for someone who usually sits like he’s at a piano recital. “I know,” he says, sounding weary in a terribly human sort of way.

“I dunno, it just seemed like what Beausoliel said got up in your circuits or whatever and I was just trying to—shit, I don’t know, distract you? Cheer you up?”

“Why would ‘marvelous feats of architecture’ cheer me up?”

Hank doesn’t know where he’s driving any more than he knows where he’s going with this conversation. They’re in some kind of industrial park now, and he thinks he might be going the wrong way down a one-way street. Not even during the evacuation in November did Detroit look so much like a ghost town. “Just trying to engage with your new modern art hobby,” he says, and immediately wants to kick himself. Deflection is his knee-jerk to everything when things get emotionally hairy. Seems it’s hard-wired into his DNA the same as any android’s programming.

“I would like to go back home now, Lieutenant.”

The tires squeal in protest as Hank breaks far too quickly on the snowy street. An icy thrill zings through the marrow of his bones, the same as every time he hears that sound. It’s almost familiar now, but he still takes a moment to catch his breath before speaking. He kills the ignition and everything goes impossibly quiet. “That wasn’t what—that didn’t come out how I meant. Look, I’m bad at this, you know that. Cut me some slack, alright? I’m allergic to feelings. I make allowances for all of _your_ roboty weirdness.” He tries a thin smirk, anything to insulate the exposed nerve of this conversation with a layer of humor.

“It’s not meant to be art, modern or otherwise.” Connor is looking down, talking to his own hands, quiet and cornered and vicious.

“Well, what is it then? We can keep dancing around this for another week or you can tell me why your apartment looks like Oz and you don’t want me to know about it.”

Connor’s hands clench so tightly Hank thinks he can hear the plastic of his insides squeak. “Why do you think you’re entitled to know everything about me?”

Hank’s entire skeleton and all of his guts flinch away at the sting, but Hank does his best to stay outwardly still. _You know this game,_ he tells himself. _Connor may have learned from the best, but you’ve been playing longer than he has._ “I don’t think that,” he says, and he’s a little proud of how level it comes out. “I just want to understand. Something I did or didn’t do or said or didn’t say pissed you off, and I can’t fix it unless I know what it is.” This is probably the most mature he’s ever sounded in his life. He sort of wishes he had Connor’s video memory so he could preserve the evidence for posterity.

Connor doesn’t reply for a long time. He just sits there, staring at his hands, stone-still, but there’s something terribly brittle about the lines of him. If Hank were to reach out and touch him, he might dissolve and blow away.

“It’s not supposed to be art,” Connor says finally. Every word sounds like an effort. “It’s... I don’t know exactly how to explain it. You might not understand if I did.”

“Try me.”

“I suppose… I’m trying to see the shape of something.” All the fight seems to rush out of him at once, and he slouches down even further in his seat as if all of his artificial muscles have suddenly gone slack.

“The shape of something?” Hank doesn’t know when he started whispering, but he can’t stop.

Connor’s rubbing his hands together fitfully, as if warming them in front of a fire. This is a tic Hank recognizes—it’s what Connor does when he’s thinking and there’s no coin on hand for him to fiddle with. Hank rummages around in his coat pocket. There are no quarters, but he does find a single warm nickel. He reaches across the center console and slots the coin between Connor’s pressed-together palms like a token into an arcade game. Connor startles, eyes flitting up to catch Hank’s for just an instant. The ghost of a smile flickers in the lines of his face as the nickel begins to dance.

“What are you trying to see, Connor?” Hank prompts, as gently as he can manage.

“Connor.” The reply is immediate.

“You’re trying to see Connor?” Hank frowns. “You’re gonna have to explain that one to me.”

The coin leaps and twirls as Connor’s agitation visibly spikes again. Hank is getting dizzy watching it. “Do you like me, Hank? Are we friends?” Connor demands, head whipping around to stare Hank full in the face with blazing eyes.

“I, uh. Well, yeah, thought that was obvious."

“ _Why?_ ” The question is sharp, a whip crack in the cold and quiet.

“What do you mean, _why?_ You saying you’re sick of me or something?” Hank is inescapably sober and so lost in this conversation.

The coin is abruptly seized in Connor’s fist, and everything goes very, very still. Connor is breathing heavy—probably the first time Hank has ever seen him do that—and under his strangely ragged breaths, there’s the sound of a tortured fan, like an old laptop overheating. _Do you need me to blow on you or something?_ Hank thinks hysterically.

“Why do you like me?” Connor asks slowly. “Why are we friends?”

 _Because you’re a brave goddamn idiot,_ Hank might say. _Because you know where Sumo likes to be scratched and you give him pepperoni when you think I’m not looking. Because you sent me a notarized apology letter for hating_ Diehard. _Because one time you sat there and licked all the grease off a piece of pizza and recited every foreign contaminant you detected. Because you have brown eyes. Because you somehow dig up dog memes from 2005 and email them to me during the workday. Because you threw your tie out the window. Because you call Reed obscene things in foreign languages when he pisses me off. Because you put up with my horseshit. Because you don’t let me get away with any of it. Because you’re some kind of hyper-intelligent beautiful alien-computer-man and you watch TV on weeknights with my crusty ass anyway._

Instead, all he manages is, “I don’t know, Connor, why does anybody like anybody?”

The look on Connor’s face is almost identical to the one he wore that night he urged Hank out of his apartment: something like hope, something like disappointment. “You got attached to me because we had a few near-death experiences together and came out of it alive,” he says. “You’re attached to our attachment, not to me. It’s not your fault. What about me could you possibly get attached to? I’m _blank._ I have free will, sure, but I have no past, no context, nothing but some vestigial programmed impulses and a personality matrix built in a lab. In January, someone asked me what my favorite color is and my components overheated so badly trying to answer that I had to go stand in the morgue’s walk-in freezer for forty-three minutes.”

He breaks off, finally releasing Hank from his death-stare to gaze out the windshield instead. “That’s what I mean when I say I’m trying to see Connor,” he says softly. “Unlike you, I haven’t had an entire life to figure out what that means. I’m just trying to figure out what I even have to offer you, or anyone.”

“Bullshit.”

The look of affront on Connor's face would be funny in any other circumstance. Hank turns in his seat as best he can to recline back against the driver’s seat door and fold his arms stonily. “You don’t get to steal all my paperclips and my spare change and shit so you can hide in your apartment and build a secret monument to your existential crisis,” he scoffs. “You have to work that shit out in public and embarrass yourself like the rest of us. A life isn’t something that you finish and go _voila!_ And hang it up in a gallery. It’s a mess, and it isn’t a mess you can contain in a shitty little apartment. It’s a big fucking mess that’s probably in the way of everyone else’s mess. And you take pieces of everyone else’s mess and they take pieces of yours and you build with those pieces. Maybe what you build will make sense when you run out of time, maybe it won’t.”

Fuck it. He leans forward and sets his hand on the back of Connor’s neck. The cooling system inside Connor sound like it’s still going overtime, and the artificial skin beneath Hank’s palm is strange. It doesn’t quite feel like people skin. It’s sort of rubbery, more like an eggplant or something, only hot, much hotter than a human. Connor doesn’t pull away. If anything, he presses into the cup of Hank’s hand. The moisture of Hank’s breath and the warmth of both of them has steamed up the insides of the car windows, and for all Hank knows, they could be the only two people left alive on the earth.

“I want to see the mess,” Hank murmurs. “Hell, you’ve already seen most of mine.”

Connor’s expression doesn’t soften, but his head slowly drifts forward, until his forehead thuds against Hank’s sternum. Hank finds himself smiling, pressing circles into the back of Connor’s neck with his thumb until the strained humming and whining of the android’s internal components quiets.

By the time Connor pulls back into his own seat, Hank can feel the beginnings of a bruise forming on his chest. The silence in the car on the way back to Connor’s apartment isn’t comfortable, but it isn’t as ugly as it was.

“Not tonight,” Connor says as they slow in front of the building. He looks over at Hank, lit up all cool and blue and almost smiling. “But soon, I think.” He reaches over and brushes his fingertips against the back of Hank’s neck, just where Hank had held him earlier. A shiver skitters down Hank’s spine. The touch against his neck is warm and smooth and inhuman.

“See you, then,” he says lamely.

“See you,” Connor says, and then he’s gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha whoops, this got long and complicated. some weird robot shit next chapter
> 
> hit me up at everyoneissquidwardinpurgatory.tumblr.com or @flamingo_tooth if you wanna


	3. under the table all along

**March 28, 2039**

 

It’s Monday morning and there’s a mess on Connor’s desk, throwing a grungy sparkle into Hank’s gummy hungover eyes.

Hank pours the wreck of himself into his chair in pieces. Somebody pulped his insides last night while he wasn’t looking and no amount of coffee and Advil will fix it. He’d been watching the vintage movie channel and _Secondhand Lions_ was on. Something made him reach for the bottle, something about the movie, god knows what. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but he woke up with his face mashed into the cushions so hard he had the waffle upholstery stamped on his skin for an hour.                                                                                                                                

The THIS IS PROBABLY WHISKEY mug has been totally upended over Connor’s desk, and Connor is hunched low over the clutter, stirring it with his twitchy fingers, tucking choice bits into his shirt pocket.

“Why.” Hank slumps over his desktop, hand on his forehead, sort of to hold his head up, sort of to pull his eyelids open. He’s pretty sure his eyeballs are trying to unbirth themselves. But there’s Connor, helping himself to stuff that isn’t his again, and he’s smiling. It isn’t the big dorky Loony Tunes grin, but for the first time in a week it’s a smile for Hank. At Hank. It’s a smile _at_ Hank.

“Good morning, Hank. You look terrible and you stink. I’m taking all your dimes.”

“I’m going to report you to HR for theft. They’ll have your badge for this. Could be persuaded to be merciful if you get me a coffee like a good little robot, though.”

“Get it yourself or I’ll report _you_ to HR for discriminatory language. There’s a zero tolerance policy for the R-word in this precinct.”

As Hank wobbles to the break room in search of coffee, he has to keep scrubbing his hand over his mouth to make it stop doing whatever it’s trying to do. He’d call it a smile if it didn’t feel so woozy and stupid. Collins smirks at him as he goes by. If he doesn’t get his face under control, it’s only a matter of time before somebody asks him why the hell he’s so chipper this morning, did he get laid last night or something?

He’s pouring coffee, preemptively preparing gourmet your-mom comebacks with all the trimmings, when the shouting starts.

The occasional disturbance isn’t uncommon in the station—people do tend to get a little grumpy when they’re arrested and hauled in for questioning. But this sounds more involved than usual, maybe physical, and one of the raised voices is definitely Connor’s. Too late, Hank realizes in his mad rush back out to the bullpen that he’s still holding his coffee cup, and hot black coffee has sloshed out over his knuckles and all down his front. He doesn’t even have time to curse about it properly before he sees the source of the racket.

There’s Jeremy, and his little sneakers are flailing over a foot off off the ground. Connor’s got him by the back of his collar with one hand like a kitten, unflinching as Jeremy’s heels drum against his shins. And there’s Beausoliel, a few feet away, wrapped octopus-like around another thrashing kid.

The kid in Beausoliel’s grip is going _Fuck you! You took my mom! Fuck you! Fuck you!_ Hank’s never seen the kid before, but there’s something of his mom in the hysterical red twist of his face and the mop of nice-boy blond hair. His upper lip is split and already swelling, which definitely makes him resemble his dad.

Jeremy is clawing at the air and giving as good as he’s getting, spitting back _fuck you_ s and worse. Hank remembers learning to swear on the playground, but goddamn if there isn’t something weirdly upsetting about hearing this little kid who loves plants snarling obscenities like, well, Hank.

“You threw me away! You threw me away, you shit-ass butt-fuck! You threw me away!” Jeremy shrieks. He almost manages to twist out of Connor’s hold, but then Connor’s other arm comes up around the kid’s chest and pulls him back, crushing him into the world’s most uncomfortable looking hug. But Jeremy doesn’t stop fighting, and in his thrashing his head slams back into Connor’s face with what looks like enough force to chip teeth.

That’s enough of that.

“WHAT IN THE HOLY SIDEWAYS _FUCK_ IS GOING ON?” Hank roars.

Every head in the station snaps up as one in a motion that looks almost choreographed. The boys, startled out of their struggle, go slack in their wranglers’ arms. Probably there’s somebody in the world able to yell louder than Hank when they’ve a mind, but Hank has yet to meet that person.

“An altercation, Lieutenant,” Connor says in the hush that follows. There’s blue blood oozing from his nose and down over his lips, and he doesn’t even seem to notice.

Hank puts every inch of his height and every ounce of his hangover into looming over the whole scene like the ghost of Christmas future. “‘Altercation,’ my ass. You!” He jabs a finger at one of Jeremy’s android social workers, backed up against Connor’s desk and dithering uselessly. She flinches at the address, eyes wide, and Hank can’t help but gentle a bit. She’s utterly out of her depth. Aren’t they all. “Don’t know your name, sorry. Why don’t you and Jeremy go hang out in the conference room for a bit until everyone cools down? End of the hall on the left.

The social worker quavers something in the affirmative, and Connor lowers Jeremy carefully to the floor. All the fight has gone out of the kid. He’s just staring at the floor now, arms limp at his sides, but the social worker still approaches like she’s defusing a bomb. She takes him gently by the shoulders and steers him down the hall.

They’re barely out of sight when Hank swoops down on the pile of Beausoliels on the floor. He hoists the dad up with one large hand and the brat up with the other, standing them side by side like suspects in a lineup.

“I think maybe we’d better reschedule whatever you were doing here for some other day, what do you think?” Hank asks sweetly, straightening Beausoliel’s collar and patting it flat.

“Interview,” Beausoliel croaks. “Character witness. With…” Seeming to forget his son’s name momentarily, he’s left fluttering one hand vaguely in the space over the kid’s head.

Hank smiles his most horrible smile and nods, clapping Beausoliel’s shoulder. “Great. How about let’s reschedule that for March 32nd. Someone will follow up with you about a time. Drive safe out there, now! Please get a vasectomy at your earliest convenience.” He propels Beausoliel toward the front lobby with one hand, and Beausoliel goes without a fuss, towing his kid behind him.

Now that the combatants are gone, Hank can feel the weight of every eye in the station on the back of his neck. He turns, and yep, they’re all gawping, Fowler included, gazing down from his office on high like some kind of weary god.

And then his vision tunnels around Connor, still as stone right where Hank left him, with blue blood limning the seam of his lips. The breast pocket of his shirt bulges a little with dimes, stolen to line the walls of a shitty little apartment with glittering fish-skin. It’s easy to cross the floor and wrap a hand around his upper arm, even under the weight of all the looks, easy to pull him out of the weirdly silent bullpen and down the hall.

“We should go talk to Jeremy,” Connor mumbles as they go, but he doesn’t resist. He just lets Hank march him into the men’s room and plant him in front of one of the sinks. His voice sounds like it’s coming from farther away than it usually does, as if whatever speaker or whatever is inside his throat has been knocked down into the depths of him. He isn’t wearing a tie today—he approaches business casual like an undercover mission—but he’s pawing at his collar as though there’s something there to realign, to fix.

Hank realizes he’s still holding his coffee cup in his other hand, and he sets it on the counter and shakes droplets of cold coffee from his fingers. He pumps the paper towel dispenser for about ten feet of paper towels and sticks the whole wad under the tap. “We will go talk to Jeremy,” he agrees. “But do you really wanna go in there with your face all _Fight Club_ and give him a complex?”

A flicker of surprise crosses Connor’s face as he glances in the mirror for the first time. “Oh,” he says, and brings a hand up to touch the blue still streaming from his nostrils.

“Hold your nose and tip your head forward,” Hank says, wringing out the wet towels.

“That’s not really necessary. I don’t have a—”

Hank bats Connor’s hands away from his face and shushes him with the short sharp noise he usually gives Sumo to warn him away from eating some other dog’s shit. “Nope, I don’t want to hear whatever weird robot thing you’re about to tell me. Just humor me.” He presses the soggy clump of disintegrating towels under Connor’s nose. Connor makes a weird little startled electric toothbrush noise, but he doesn’t try to pull away. “Does that hurt?” Hank asks anyway.

“No, I… no. It doesn’t hurt.”

If anyone were to walk in right now, Hank reflects, this might be a slightly weird tableau—one grown man mopping up another grown man’s bloody nose as though tending to a kid’s playground injury. Connor doesn’t even make any move to take the wet towels from Hank and hold them to his face himself like a normal person would. He just stands there stiff as a tin soldier, and Jesus Christ, he’s _staring_ , making unblinking and totally unabashed eye contact.

Anchoring his attention firmly to the middle of Connor’s face, Hank begins to gently wipe away some of the accumulated blood, dabbing it from Connor’s upper lip and scrubbing a drying smear from his cheek. Connor’s lips are stained blue but Hank can’t make himself wipe them off, isn’t sure that’s a line he should cross. “So, uh, you wanna tell me what happened out there?”

“Jeremy didn’t start it.” When Connor opens his mouth to speak, there’s blue in all the spaces between his pretty Chiclet-perfect teeth.

Hank presses the towels back under Connor’s nostrils to stanch a new dribble of blood. “Doesn’t matter who started it. Just want to know what happened.”

“Jeremy came in when you got up. That other boy. Beausoliel’s. He showed up right after and as soon as he saw Jeremy, he picked up a stapler and threw it at him. He missed and hit a chair. They struggled. I pulled Jeremy away.” No puffs of air escape Connor’s mouth when he talks, but there’s a radiant heat against the heel of Hank’s hand that seems to soak into his veins and crawl up his arm.

He should pull his hand away. He should step back. The warmth coming off Connor is tugging Hank toward some kind of event horizon. “And, uh—” his voice comes out in a weird rasping gurgle, and he clears his throat before trying again. “And the Beausoliel kid tackled him first, right? Jeremy was just defending himself?”

Abruptly, Connor’s hand darts up to touch the front of Hank’s shirt, just below his sternum. Hank’s stomach muscles jump at the touch, and he can’t help but flinch away half a step. Connor, apparently oblivious, just follows, pinching the loud fabric between his fingers. “You spilled your coffee,” he says, eyes still locked on Hank’s face. “Did it burn you?”

Hank wants to swallow, but can’t seem to remember how. His mouth is too full of spit and his throat is so dry. “Only a bit. Probably only need a few skin grafts.”

Connor doesn’t laugh at the joke, doesn’t even smile. Instead of letting go of Hank’s shirt, he twists his fingers into it, gathering up a fistful of rayon and sinking his knuckles lightly into the softness of Hank’s gut. He’s blinking yellow-yellow-yellow now like a broken stoplight, and his expression is too neutral, as if he’s switched off his face entirely. The irises of his eyes are very dark and the whites are very white and up close they’re marble-shiny.

Somehow, Hank can feel the gentle pressure of Connor’s knuckles all the way to his spine.

“Jeremy wasn’t just defending himself. He was angry. He wanted that fight,” Connor says tonelessly. “I could have prevented him from ever getting physical with that boy, maybe pulled them apart sooner, but I didn’t. I think I wanted him to fight. I think I wanted him to hurt that boy.” His flat affect doesn’t crack, but his grip on Hank’s shirt tightens. “Maybe I still want that.”

Grave-dirt and pennies again. And salt. There’s nothing Hank or any human has any right to say to that. So he does all he can do. He reaches out and gathers Connor in, bundles up all of his hard angles and tucks him close, squeezing just enough to keep him from flying apart. Connor leans in with more weight than Hank was prepared for and drops his head down to mash his face into Hank’s shoulder.

It’s a weird hug, what with Connor’s fist still trapped between them and his other arm dangling at his side and Hank having to work to hold them both up under Connor’s startling weight. Hank has hugged Connor before, but it strikes him just now how different holding an android is from holding a human. There are no soft places where there should be, no familiar ridges of bone, just a layer of rubbery give stretched over an assemblage of hard alien shapes. He’s too warm in some places and too cold in others, and in the quiet of the empty bathroom Hank thinks he can hear the barely-there hum of Connor’s insides.

“Sometimes…” Connor begins, muffled against Hank’s shoulder. Hank waits for the rest, but Connor just burrows in further and breathes tiny overheated-laptop hitching noises into Hank’s shirt. Hank can feel the pilfered dimes in Connor’s pocket bulging against his chest.

He dimly realizes he’s rocking the two of them—how long has he been doing that? It’s just a tiny weight-shift sway, the kind of comfort movement the body remembers even when the rest of you doesn’t. Maybe his arms remember a smaller body, a lighter weight, but they’re big enough for this. Connor’s leaning into the movement, and they’re swaying together like kids at a high school prom, and yeah, the ache is still there but it’s just an arthritic twinge before the rain.

_This is easy,_ Hank thinks, and the thought is so comfortable and so, so heavy.

“There’s so much,” Connor says. He lifts his head, and Hank gently disengages from the hug-dance. Connor’s hand is still clenched around Hank’s shirt, but there’s something softer about the lines of him now. Connor looks almost dazed—Hank would say _sleepy_ if he didn’t know better.

“So much what?”

Connor shrugs loosely. “Just. So much. Sometimes.” Finally, he lets go of the front of Hank’s shirt, and reaches up to brush Hank’s shoulder instead. “Sorry, it got on you.”

Hank cranes his neck around to look at his own shoulder, and yep, there’s some blue blood smeared and soaked into the fabric. “Gee, thanks for wiping your nose on me,” he huffs, reaching up to rub pointlessly at the stain with his fingers.

“It will be invisible soon.” Connor’s fingers are suddenly on the stain again, warm next to Hank’s. He looks from the blood to Hank’s face, then back again. One side of his mouth lifts in the weirdest smirk Hank’s ever seen. “But you know, I like this color on you, Lieutenant. You should wear more blue.”

Hank can feel his ears go hot, and before he can construct a reply, Connor is moving away to preen in front of the mirror. Hank watches while he straightens his collar, re-tucks his shirt, wipes a lingering smear of thirium from his mouth with the pad of his thumb.

“Guess we should go talk to Jeremy now,” Hank chokes out.

Connor looks at him in the mirror’s reflection. “I’m ready when you are.” He flashes a 100-watt smile with dimples and everything, but to Hank’s utter relief the blood on his teeth and lips renders it absolutely _ghastly._ Before they leave the bathroom, he insists that Connor swish and spit at least three times. 

 

* * *

 

 

“I’m not sorry.”

Jeremy is quiet and steady, already too old for his chubby cheeks and big angel-eyes. But he’s rubbing the fabric of Connor’s jacket sleeve between his fingers, demanding that connection even as he refuses to make eye contact with anyone in the room.

“I know,” Connor says, at the same time as Hank says, “We don’t want you to be sorry.”

Three pairs of startled android eyes snap in Hank’s direction. He’s tucked into the most unobtrusive corner of the room he could find—he initially figured this isn’t his conversation, he’s just here for Connor. In case Connor decides he needs a sleeve to hold onto, too. But some deeply-buried dad instinct has hijacked his mouth and won’t shut up.

“We don’t want you to be sorry,” Hank repeats. “We just want you to be alright. Are you? Anything… I don’t know, broken or whatever?”

Jeremy plasters himself closer to Connor, but he does look Hank full in the face for the first time. “Just my shirt,” he mumbles, plucking despondently at the stretched-out neckline.

Hank leans in and inspects the shirt. “Nah, toss it in the dryer, it’ll be good as new.” He has no idea if that’s true, but Jeremy lightens up a bit, so he figures it’s worth it in the moment. “Listen, he started it, we get it. He was throwing stuff at you. You were just protecting yourself, right?” He gives Jeremy his best _the only answer to this question is yes_ eyebrows.

“Yeah?” Jeremy says slowly.

“And he hit you first, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, he hit me first.”

“Okay then.” Hank leans back in his chair and nods. “I don’t think Mr. Beausoliel is going to push it.” He lets the _not if he knows what’s good for him_ hang unspoken in the air.

Connor, who has, until this moment, just been gaping quietly at Hank, seems to snap out of it. “Why don’t we talk again some other day, Jeremy?” he says, more to the social worker than the kid. “I think it’s been kind of a long morning, what do you think?”

They walk Jeremy and his social worker to the door, shepherding them through quieter hallways to avoid the stares in the bullpen—Jeremy may have calmed down, but he’s still fragile (and maybe he’s not the only one). Instead, they go out the side door where the smokers congregate and stand in the side lot to wait for a cab together. While they wait, Jeremy starts to become chatty again, if a little shyer than usual. He talks about the android-run group home for displaced child models he’s been living in since that terrible night, about the kids there and how he wishes they got to watch more TV. It’s only temporary, they all know—only five months after the revolution, nobody’s quite sure what to do with these kids who were never built to grow up.

Even so, listening to Jeremy complain about Max who hoards all the markers, Hank can’t help but feel relieved. Or warmed. Or something. People are cultivating new normals in strange soil. They always do.

“Hey kid,” Hank says as Jeremy and the social worker clamber into their cab. “Just one thing.”

Jeremy freezes, looking uncertain. “What?”

“Don’t use a word unless you know how to use it properly. Have a little class, okay?”

“O…kay?”

“Just don’t go around calling people butt-fucks anymore. Call them assholes instead, like a civilized person.”

Connor hisses a scandalized _Hank!_ as the social worker firmly shuts the door. The final look she gives them through the window isn’t quite dirty, but it is disapproving. Given some practice, Hank reflects, she’s going to perfect that condescending social worker stare. She’ll do alright.

The cab pulls away. Hank shakes his head after it. “‘Shit-ass butt-fuck.’ Where’d he even _hear_ that?” Connor’s reply is a half-playful shove to his arm that almost knocks him on his ass.

They watch the cab until it disappears around a corner. “Welp, we better get going,” Hank says, hooking a thumb toward the parking lot.

“‘Going’? Going where?”

“Yeah, you know. We’ve got that thing. For a case. Could take all day. Better get started if we wanted to finish today.” He’s heading toward his car and holding up the key fob to remotely unlock it before he even finishes talking, and after a moment, he hears Connor trotting behind him.

“We’re not… ‘playing hooky,’ are we, Lieutenant?” Connor says as he swings into the passenger seat. The quotation marks are clearly audible in his voice and he sounds so sly and pleased that a surge of fondness warms Hank’s stomach.

“Of course not. We’re on a very important assignment. I’m honestly hurt that you’d imply that I would ever encourage delinquent behavior.”

 

* * *

 

Any human would be bowled off their feet by Sumo’s deliriously excited greeting, but not much can move Connor if he wants to stay put. He just squats down to meet the tackle and catches the dog up in his arms, gives him a twirl. “Hel- _lo_ , yes, yes, I missed you too, you beautiful boy, Sumo the good boy,” he coos into the ample fluff of Sumo’s belly, effortlessly cradling the enormous mutt like a baby.

“Put that dog down, you’re gonna give him unrealistic expectations.” Hank hangs up his coat and drops his keys in the dish by the door. “He already acts like a lapdog half the time. Now he’ll think I can put him in a purse and carry him around like a Beverly Hills chihuahua.”

“Maybe if it was a very large purse. Custom-made, possibly.” Connor puts Sumo down just long enough to let Hank bully him out of his jacket and shoes, then immediately scoops the ecstatic dog back up. Hank goes to fetch a beer from the kitchen, leaving Connor still standing by the front door, face buried in dog like he’s trying to smother himself.

The house becomes smaller with Connor in it, more real, less riddled with holes where dark and hungry things might hide. Even the light in the fridge is so bright today. Hank stares into the fridge longer than he really should, wasting electricity letting his face get cold before grabbing his beer.

Connor and Sumo have disappeared from the living room by the time Hank returns, though Connor’s shoes and jacket are still by the front door. Instead of calling out, Hank heads down the hallway, quiet on socked feet. He has no idea why he’s creeping around in his own house like a burglar, but then again, he can’t really explain to himself any of the bizarre shit he’s done lately.

He finds Connor in the bathroom, still holding Sumo and facing the shower. Sumo, head and paws placidly slung up over Connor’s shoulder like an enormous hairy child, announces Hank’s arrival with a quiet whuff and a lazy tail wag.

“You have seven different bottles of shampoo in your shower and four bottles of shower gel,” Connor says without turning around.

Hank leans against the door and sips his beer. “Ah, great, I was hoping you’d help me inventory my personal hygiene products today. Want to tackle the medicine cabinet next?”

“I’d be happy to,” Connor says agreeably, and Hank snorts. He knows for a fact Connor has a healthy sense of sarcasm and he’s only ever obtuse like this when he’s being a little shit. Connor turns slightly so he can see Hank around the gigantic dog in his arms. “Do you actually use seven different kinds of shampoo when you wash your hair?”

“Yeah, every day.” Hank rolls his eyes. “Of course I don’t fucking use seven different kinds of shampoo. Have you met me? Most of ‘em are empty.”

“Then why keep the bottles if they’re empty? Are you using them for something?”

Hank is suddenly horribly aware of the state of his bathroom—dog-hair tumbleweeds wandering the floor, soap scum on the tile, toothpaste splatters on the mirror, pubes in the tub. But the thing is, Connor actually seems to be asking in earnest, like he really wants to know why somebody would accumulate empty shampoo bottles in their shower. “I dunno, I just forget to throw ‘em away I guess,” he mutters into his beer. “And I just buy whatever’s on sale, so.”

“So you aren’t keeping them for any reason. They just pile up by accident.”

“Yeah? I guess? What’s your point?"

Connor’s forehead creases, and he glances between the shower and Hank. “I guess I’m curious. Envious, maybe. I don’t think I’m able to just… accumulate things without meaning to,” he says. “I don’t know how to do things without intention. I probably never will.”

“Pretty sure the nature of doing things unintentionally is that you don’t try to do them,” Hank says slowly, raising an eyebrow. “It’s not like it’s something you can practice or know how to do. Also, you really don’t have to be jealous because you don’t know how to be a slob.”

A quiet hum is Connor’s only response, and he studies Hank for a moment, unblinking, before abruptly squeezing past him into the hallway. But instead of turning back toward the living room, he moseys up the hall like he owns the place and turns into Hank’s room, still toting Sumo. Hank can’t help but follow, mystified and ambiguously nervous for reasons he can’t even articulate to himself.

“You like bold patterns,” Connor remarks to the loud disorder of Hank’s closet. “Why?”

The beer in Hank’s hand is too slippery, his fingers suddenly too unsteady. He sets it down before he can drop it and crosses his arm instead, tucking his jittery hands into his armpits. He just hadn’t realized there was going to be a pop quiz today, is all.

“Dunno.” It’s easier to focus on Sumo’s dopey face over Connor’s shoulder than it is to look at Connor’s back—the quizzical tilt of his head, the rigid meridian of his spine. Connor has brought all of his strangeness and _newness_ into Hank’s hiding places today and it makes him want to confess things. “Kind of always have. I think I wore ugly shirts ironically when I was a kid or something and it stuck. Everyone did everything ironically back then, but when you get old I think you get sincere without noticing.”

“You call them ‘ugly shirts,’ but you wear them sincerely. Do you actually think they’re ugly?”

“I _know_ they’re ugly,” Hank says, then, before he knows what he’s saying: “But I like ‘em. The colors, and all.” It sounds so stupid coming out, and he can feel his face going warm beneath his beard. But Connor just nods and hums again, light blinking away like he’s cataloguing vital case info. Then he’s brushing by Hank again and heading into the hallway with no explanation, and Hank is pulled along by his gravity.

Connor pauses almost unnoticeably in front of the shut and locked door across the hall, the one still littered with Matchbox cars and discarded socks, the one that will never be empty enough. Hank braces himself for the question, but Connor doesn’t say anything at all, and continues down the hall toward the living room.

( _Not tonight._ The memory is blue and quiet. _But soon, I think._

And Hank thinks: _Yes._ )

It’s hard to say how long Connor leads Hank around the house, clutching a drooling St. Bernard like a stuffed animal and interrogating all the cobwebbed little corners of Hank’s life. Together, they examine the magnets on the fridge, the hoard of novelty mugs, the arbitrary order of Hank’s records, the toys in Sumo’s bed, the battery of liquor bottles in the cabinet, the accumulated stains on the sofa. Hank remembers dissecting frogs in sophomore year biology, how they’d had to t-pin the sticky-cold hands and feet to pocked blue mats before they could cut. These pins are kind and they sting only a little, but there’s still someone rummaging around his abdominal cavity and pulling things out that should really stay in.

A sudden wave of fatigue drives him to the sofa in the middle of Connor’s inspection of the spice cabinet. He sprawls across the cushions and pulls a musty throw blanket over his head to block out the world. Pinpricks of light wink through the weave of the blanket like stars, and everything goes blessedly quiet, just for a moment.

And then 170 pounds of dog is deposited on his stomach from above. While Hank groans and wheezes under the sudden weight, he feels strong hands around his calves, lifting his feet just enough that another body can insinuate itself beneath them.

Hank wrestles the blanket off his face and props himself up just enough that he can scowl over Sumo at Connor, sitting stiff and contrite at the other end of the sofa, Hank’s feet resting in his lap.

“Sorry,” Connor says. “It looked like you needed him.”

Hank lets his head fall back onto the armrest and drapes his arms around Sumo, closing his eyes. The weight of his monster dog might rupture his lungs, but yeah, he supposes he feels—anchored, maybe. And there’s a hand loosely encircling his right ankle, cool and steady, thumb tracing the knit lines of his ribbed sock cuff.

“Thank you for indulging me, Hank.”

The movement of Connor’s thumb on his ankle is hypnotic. Hank couldn’t get up now even if there weren’t a St. Bernard on his chest. “Seen enough, then?” he mumbles around a yawn.

The response is a long time coming, and Hank is barely awake to catch it. His blood has turned to syrup in his veins.

“No,” Connor murmurs, and the hand around Hank’s ankle tightens minutely.

Maybe there’s another word after that, but Hank can’t be sure through the haze of the oncoming nap. It sounds a lot like _Never._

 

* * *

 

Hank is pushing a line of nested shopping carts across an endless parking lot. He doesn’t know how long the line is—it’s too far away to see—but he knows there’s someone riding in the basket of the very last cart, and he can’t stop pushing or that person won’t get where they’re going. The sky is yellow, and a row of dark and unambiguous shapes oozes out of the horizon. And overhead, the blazing wheel of the sun.

_Hank._

He’s dragging a ball and chain along behind him, but it isn’t too bad. He’s carried heavier things.

_Hank?_

The sun spins, and he’s pretty sure it’s close enough to grab, to put it in his pocket and keep it for his own, if he could only let go of the shopping cart handle.

“Hank!”

The living room is dark, and Hank only narrowly avoids smacking heads with Connor when he jerks awake. Connor is looming over him, too close and illuminated only by the yellow of his LED. Well, that explains that, then.

“Connor, what the fuck,” Hank rasps, trying to claw his way out of that clammy post-nap disorientation.

“Sorry to wake you. Can I show you something?”

Hank runs his tongue over his teeth. They feel furry. “Holy shit, what time is it? How long’ve I been asleep?”

“It’s a little after ten. Can I please show you something?” Connor seems impatient, almost agitated.

“Jesus Christ, I’ve been asleep for that long? Why didn’t you wake me up?” Hank scrubs both his hands over his face. That was the worst kind of nap and there’s no reason for Connor to be so goddamn close. Time is a government fabrication and it’s entirely possible Hank has been abducted by aliens.

“Hank, please get up and put your shoes and your jacket on. I want to show you something. I’ll drive and we can pick up coffee on the way if you need it.”

Hank squints at Connor through the glare of his LED. “The fuck is wrong with you?” he asks. “Where are we going? You gonna whack me or something?”

“Please?”

It’s entirely possible Hank is still asleep, this entire scene is so surreal. He struggles to sit up and seizes Connor by the shoulders. He tries to physically shake some sense into him, but it’s impossible to move Connor when he doesn’t want to be moved, so instead he just pokes him in the chest to punctuate every word. “Connor. Stop. Have mercy. Please what. Show me what.” While Connor blinks owlishly at him, he adds, “Also, whatever it is, no, you’re not driving my car.”

“I—” Connor cuts himself off and looks away, whatever gears power his ridiculous computer brain visibly whirring at top-speed. “I want to try again now. I want you to… to see. If you want.”

For a moment, Hank’s mind just spins in neutral. But Connor’s shoulders are hot through the fabric of his shirt and his eyes are darting around as though reading words only he can see and god, Hank has never noticed that Connor has a pulse and—oh.

“Alright. We can do that, sure. It’s gotta be right now, huh?” he says, quiet and slow, as though inviting a shy animal to come closer to his outstretched hand.

A pitchy, somewhat hysterical laugh bubbles up out of Connor. “Hank, I let you sleep for eight hours so I could use that time to convince myself this is a good idea. Can we please go before I talk myself out of it again?”

“Shit, yeah, okay,” Hank says. He squeezes Connor’s shoulders just once, to soothe the rabbiting pulse under his fingers. “Okay.”

 

* * *

 

The walls of Connor’s apartment are alive with coins. Most are tarnished, but they still throw back a suggestion of two silhouettes. As they stand there, Hank gets the strangest feeling he’s glimpsing through a dark and too-thin membrane his doppelganger from another universe.

“I remember disliking the sight of it on the floor,” Connor is saying, hovering at Hank’s shoulder. He’s had his arms wrapped tight around himself since they got here, as if worried all of his bolts and wires are going to come spilling out if he doesn’t hold them in. “Or, maybe not disliking. Not yet, anyway. Maybe it was just an understanding of wrongness. I don’t know. But when I put it back, it was so. Well. It was swimming. Its gills moved. And it just looked. Hmm. It glittered. And I put it there. I replay that image a lot, the swimming. When I need to.”

The place is no less startling than the last time Hank glimpsed it, but it doesn’t scare him this time. Connor walks him through it, lets Hank look at anything he wants. He doesn’t explain everything, just some things, if Hank asks. Hank takes his time, walks and talks so carefully. He’s been offered something terrifyingly fragile, he knows—all new and trembling and bird-boned, and he’s got to handle it so, so gently. He recognizes a lot of objects in here, now that he really has time to look. There are vending machine wind-up toys strung into garlands on fishing wire, wreathes and rosettes made of folded up _Far Side_ calendar pages. The sight of them wraps warm fingers around Hank’s throat.

It’s an eye-blurring riot of cast-offs and garbage and stupid tchotchkes and somewhere in all of that, there’s— _something._ A shape, maybe. An understanding. A beginning. Something tenuous and incomplete, just beyond Hank’s grasp.

Hank turns to say something, maybe to ask something, and Connor’s eyes are impossibly brown in a white and gray plastic face that catches the fluorescent light, serial number stamped above one eye. His fingers are at his own shirt collar, every joint of them visible, and it really is beautiful, the way they move. They’re undoing button after button, and Hank can’t put together a single coherent thought as Connor lets the shirt fall to the floor.

“I’ve tried talking to other androids, to find some frame of reference,” Connor says, almost conversationally, far too casual for somebody undoing their fly in front of their coworker. “It doesn’t really help. I don’t think I feel in the same way. Sometimes I don’t think there are names for the things I feel, or for how I perceive things. It gets… lonely, sometimes, I guess. I might as well try to describe a color to someone who’s never seen it.” He kicks off his shoes and leans down to peel off his socks, tucking them into the shoes and setting them aside.

There’s a twist in Hank’s guts that he recognizes now, something enormous hovering over this moment. Hank is a small and helpless thing in the face of it, and it’s easier just to finally let it swallow him whole.

Connor is shucking off his jeans, and absurdly, the most shocking thing about this entire situation is that he doesn’t stop to fold them neatly. He just steps out of them and stands there, arms slightly akimbo and palms out. _Well?_ those hands say. _This is everything, the very last inch._

“I wish I knew how to offer you something you would recognize,” he says.

The remote blue of the regulator pump in his center seeps into all the lines of him, glowing in the seams of his chassis if you really look. So much care went into his face, but everything about his body is suggestion and abstraction: the approximate structure of muscles, dips where they should be, a slight swell at his groin but nothing more. Hank suspects it’s all designed to look natural under clothes, not to stand up to close scrutiny. Connor was not meant to be looked at in this way, never made for anything like this.

There are a lot of things Hank could say now, maybe should say. _You’re still figuring things out. You’ll find something more appropriate. I’m so used up. I’m so old. You don’t want this. You don’t want me._ But the moment is laid open and raw and bleeding, and Hank is so tired and so ferociously proud of this brand new creature that is building a home inside the mind and body that were never supposed to be his own.

Hank looks at those shiny white palms, open to him and asking without expectation, and he thinks: _Yes._

There’s nothing he can do but reach for those hands and lift them to his face. He brushes his lips and his mustache against the inside of each palm, breathing into them, not quite a kiss, but not quite _not_ a kiss. Whatever Connor has for skin is pliable and rubbery, padded beneath with something like ballistics gelatin. He all but collapses inward at the first touch of Hank’s mouth on his hands, and without his skin the noises of his insides are more audible. Something inside him is humming.

Connor gently extricates his hands from Hank’s grasp, and he drags his fingertips down Hank’s face, lingering curiously on his beard, then settles on the top button of Hank’s shirt. Hank is surprised to find that he isn’t nervy, not the way he might have expected. Connor can have what he wants.

“This space is enough for what little there is of me,” Connor says. He’s tossed Hank’s loud shirt du jour on the floor, and is engaged in wrestling the ratty old undershirt over Hank’s head. “If I were to build you, there wouldn’t be a room big enough to house it. Not a building. Not a city block.”

Both of their clothes are lying in a heap and now the two of them are on the floor among them. Hank’s back is propped against the wall, and he can feel the cold faces of pennies in against his skin. Connor is on him, all over him. Hank is vividly aware of his own body—the soft paunch of his belly, every strange mole he should really get checked out, the length of his bewildered half-interested dick against his thigh. But it’s hard to care when there are fingers in his chest hair, a thumb into the place just above his diaphragm where there’s no thirium pump, a cold tongue on the inside of his elbow.

It’s like being felt up by an alien. It’s so utterly Connor that Hank wants to laugh, or maybe cry.

Hank’s fingers follow the seams between the plates of Connor’s body. There’s some kind of electrical tingle there, the kind of buzz you feel in your bones. Connor is heavy in his lap, so heavy his legs are falling asleep, and the android is making quiet sounds against Hank’s collarbone: soft human sighs, mechanical purring and clicking from somewhere deeper inside.

“Sometimes I wish I could open you up and crawl inside you,” Connor murmurs into Hank’s chest hair.

That startles a breathless laugh out of Hank. With one hand, he grabs Connor’s face and drags him up to eye-level. “Goddammit, Connor, that _Silence of the Lambs_ shit kind of kills a mood,” he huffs, squeezing Connor’s cheeks so he looks like a grouchy bunny. “It sounds like you want to skin me and turn me into a people suit.”

“I’ll try anything once,” Connor mumbles through his squished face, waggling his eyebrows rakishly.

Hank laughs again and pulls Connor close. Connor wraps arms and legs around him in a crushing cephalopod embrace. He’s digging his pointy chin into Hank’s neck, and he smells like the hot air and dust vented out of old desktop computers. It’s a spectacularly uncomfortable embrace. Hank can’t remember the last time he was so comfortable.

“So what was with the robe the other day?” he asks, trailing lazy fingers down Connor’s back.

The plates of Connor’s chassis shift as he shrugs. “I’m still figuring out what I like. I own a lot of clothes you don’t know about yet, Hank,” he says simply. The _yet_ flips Hank’s stomach.

Another thought strikes him suddenly. “The other week, when I was out sick. Was it you that ding-dong-ditched me?”

It takes Connor a suspiciously long time to reply, “No.”

“Why.”

“I wanted to show up unannounced and judge your house and see how _you_ like it.”

“Connor.”

“But then I decided against it. I’ve already judged your house quite a few times, and probably will continue to do so. You should throw out all those empty shampoo bottles.”

“Christ, where’s the off-switch on you?”

They sit like that for a long time. It hurts. Hank loses feeling in his legs and he’s fairly sure Connor’s cracked one of his ribs. But he can’t care about any of it just now. The imperfection and discomfort of their tangled bodies is a grain of sand in an oyster’s mantle. Something to build around.

Connor hums with his voice and his internal components when Hank thumbs at a seam behind his ear. “So tell me,” Hank says. “How’s building Connor coming along?”

Hank can feel Connor’s smile against his neck. “I think I’m starting to see the shape of him,” Connor says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shows up a month late with a starbucks cup full of johnnie red
> 
> anyway thanks so much to everybody for reading and leaving such encouraging comments! i really enjoyed working on this one, and i hope y'all enjoyed reading it

**Author's Note:**

> this was meant to be short and silly, but why do something when you can overdo it? 
> 
> expect the next chapter by the end of the week. 
> 
> feel free to hit me up at everyoneissquidwardinpurgatory.tumblr.com or @flamingo_tooth. thanks so much for reading!


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